Another man’s touch, and
I want to break out of my body.
He presses his hands against me,
I press against myself like some scared animal
resisting its own cage. No one mentions
the beast that loneliness makes of you, years spent
cowering inside your body which is mostly
an abandoned house. He touches me
and I’m an atom bomb worth remembering,
a nuclear fission fuck up,
how desperate these atoms are
to split his atoms, to roll around in his body
without guilt,
our bones pressed so close we lose track
of whose skin is whose. Instead of this,
of knowing so intimately his nails in my back
or the hair on his chest, on his navel, down
to his big toe, or the way his smile
escapes gravity, I am left a starving creature
who would end its own hibernation
to consume his heat in winter moonlight.
He left his fingerprints on my thighs
and I studied myself like a crime scene.
He said “love”
and I was not a body
worth loving. To be a body
is the loneliest thing in the world.
There are countless verbs
for wanting something, but none of them
hurt like this.